ObamaCare updates for October 23 - 24 , 2013 ...... Audacity of Dopes ?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-24/administration-enforces-radiosilence-obamacare-enrollment-numbers

Administration Enforces Radiosilence On Obamacare Enrollment Numbers

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/24/2013 18:36 -0400

• Obama Administration
 
• Obamacare

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During this morning's Congressional hearing on the failure of Obamacare, one of the developer's let slip a little too much truth:

Jamie Dupree        ✔ @jamiedupree

CGI exec says she is not allowed to publicly say how many people have enrolled via http://healthcare.gov 

1:22 PM - 24 Oct 2013

While the self-proclaimed 'most transparent' administration fights off the French and the German over spying 'lies', and gags insurers from publicizing how many people have signed up for Obamacare, it seems the cover-up goes even further with everyone involved silenced (for now).

The CGI's statement confirms more evidence of the administration hiding the truth as InForum noted recently:

Feds ask Blue Cross Blue Shield not to release exchange numbers

The Obama administration asked North Dakota’s largest health insurer not to publicize how many people have signed up for health insurance through a new online exchange, a company official says.

During a Monday forum in Fargo for people interested in signing up for coverage via the exchange, James Nichol of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota told the crowd his company received the request from the federal government earlier Monday. Nichol is a consumer sales manager for the company.

Still, a spokeswoman from Blue Cross Blue Shield says about 14 North Dakotans have signed up for coverage since the federal exchange went live Oct. 1. That brings total statewide enrollment to 20 – less than one a day.

and.......

Pelosi: Just “fix the technology, and let’s not get too bogged down in what happens if they’re not able to fix it”

POSTED AT 8:01 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

 

It’s so simple. How is it that nobody has thought of this before? The White House has been beating its brains out pressing every helper possible into service, and all along, the solution was staring them in the face: “Just fix it.”

Via The Hill:

That’s the boiled-down message coming from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday, as Democrats are scrambling to put out the wildfire of criticism and attention aimed at the botched rollout of ObamaCare’s federal insurance website.

In a press briefing where reporters asked about no other topic, Pelosi acknowledged that the problems dogging users trying to enroll in insurance plans on the HealthCare.gov website are “beyond glitches.” But the trouble, she quickly added, “does not take away from the fact that we’re on a path” toward installing the many benefits under the law.

“Just fix it, so we can go forward,” she added. “Fix the technology, and let’s not get too bogged down in what happens if they’re not able to fix it.” …

“I have faith in technology and, while there are glitches, there are solutions as well. So I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to go forward on schedule,” she said.

Allahpundit already made a note of Pelosi’s “nay” on extending the enrollment period (though who knows if even her opposition will be enough to keep all of her House Democrats in line), but I thought this was a little too entertaining/facepalm-worthy as a lame liberal talking point to let pass. “Let’s not get too bogged down in what happens if they don’t fix it”? Uhm, you mean… disaster? Wherein the only people actually going through the trouble of signing up for ObamaCare are the ones whose high costs will topple the system? That sort of sounds like exactly what the administration should be worrying about, no? And on top of that, she blithely assuming that taking the time to try and fix the system is a even a wise recommendation, while tech experts are piling on with the evidence that it isn’t.

ObamaCare contractors: Yeah, we really should have been given months for testing

POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON OCTOBER 24, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

 

There was finger-pointing aplenty in today’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the healthcare rollout, as Ed predicted there would be from the prepared testimony; from other contractors to the federal administrators, from the supposedly prohibitive logjam of traffic to the “tyranny of the October 1st date” to last-minute changes disabling people from browsing without registering, there was much hemming and hawing over why, in the months leading up to it, “top administrators and lead contractors appeared before this committee, looked us in the eye, and assured us repeatedly that everything was on track,” as Chairman Fred Upton put it. Via Reuters:

One of the lead contractors responsible for developing the government’s troubled health-care website said Thursday his company warned the Obama administration about rollout risks, while another expressed confidence that it will be fixed in time for benefits to go live on Jan. 1.

Andrew Slavitt, executive vice president with the parent of Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI), said his company told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of concerns about testing theHealthcare.gov website.

“We expressed all of those concerns and risks,” Slavitt said in testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, without immediately elaborating on what those concerns were. …

“The system is working. People are enrolling. But people will be able to enroll at a faster pace,” said Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal. …

Slavitt blamed the administration, saying that a late decision to require consumers to create accounts before they could browse health plans contributed to the overload. “This may have driven higher simultaneous usage of the registration system that wouldn’t have occurred if consumers could window-shop anonymously,” he said.

Despite Campbell having noted in her prepared remarks that “no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature,” the contractors all more or less attested that the less than two weeks of testing that did go down was grossly, negligently inadequate. Rep. Greg Walden took them to the woodshed:

And as the Democrat representing Silicon Valley Rep. Anna Eshool pointed out, “high volumes” is a pretty lame excuse for what’s causing all of the website problems. There are plenty of websites that get way more traffic without crashing, and I would add that underestimating the volume of people checking out a website for a product that they are now legally required to purchase is borderline farcical.

Secretary Sebelius and other healthcare officials are set to testify in front of the committee on Thursday of next week; reconciling their stories with the ones presented today in any sort of flattering light is going to be quite the task.

http://freebeacon.com/hhs-predicted-obamacare-exchange-sign-up-would-take-28-minutes/

HHS Predicted Obamacare Exchange Sign Up Would Take 28 Minutes

White House approved HHS 28 minute estimate for Obamacare exchange application time in April

 

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius / AP

      

BY: Elizabeth Harrington
October 24, 2013 11:59 am

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimated consumers would take an average of 28 minutes to sign up for Obamacare, according to a notice the agency sent to the White House in February.

The American Action Forum revealedThursday that HHS earlier this year predicted consumers would need less than 30 minutes to complete online applications for the health care insurance marketplace. HHS reported those projections to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The Healthcare.gov process has not proven so easy in practice. Since its rollout on Oct. 1, the Obamacare exchange has been plagued with technical issues and “glitches,” resulting in few enrollees and long wait times. Obamacare “success stories” applaud the rare cases in which people were able to sign up over a period of several days.

“After more than two months of review, the government estimated it would receive more than 3 million individual responses and it would take the public 1.4 million hours to complete the required paperwork,” said Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy for the American Action Forum, in a blog post on the group’s website.

“In other words, HHS assumed the public would spend just 28 minutes to complete the ‘Online Application,’” he said.

“HHS also estimated these burden hours would cost no money,” Batkins added.

When using the exact estimates that 3,035,433 responses would take 1,480,944 hours to complete, the time increases slightly. Dividing the number of total hours by the number of applications equals 0.48 hours, or precisely 29.2 minutes.

“According to the actual accounts of navigating healthcare.gov and applying for insurance, the time spent online has ranged from seven hours to several days,” Batkins said.

HHS sent the estimate to the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on Feb. 5, 2013, and the White House approved it on April 30.

The enrollment process includes 90 pages of applications, which HHS predicted could be completed in less than a half hour.

The eligibility application requires standard personal information, such as name, address, income, and Social Security number, though the government assures family members of applicants that their immigration status will not be solicited. The privacy section states: “We won’t ask any questions about your medical history. Household members who don’t want coverage won’t be asked questions about citizenship or immigration status.”

The eligibility application also includes an option for voter registration and asks, “Does anyone in the household want to register to vote?”

Five days before the launch of Healthcare.gov, President Obama praised the website, comparing the consumer experience to making a purchase on Amazon.

“Visit healthcare.gov,” he said on Sept. 26. “It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, the same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on and you start looking. And here are all the options.”

According to reports, just days before it was set to launch, the website crashed with just 100 people using it, and IT executives warned that the website was not ready.

Three weeks into the exchange, Consumer Reports is advising Americans to stay away from Healthcare.gov, due to its technical problems.

“It is clear there were many missteps with the rollout of healthcare.gov,” Batkins said, “but perhaps the first mistake was assuming it would take less than 30 minutes to complete the online application.”

Keep in mind - this is just highlights from today ! 

Don’t forget Obamacare’s electronic medical records wreck

By Michelle Malkin  •  October 23, 2013 09:29 AM

Don’t forget Obamacare’s electronic medical records wreck
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013

Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health care exchange meltdown: “If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR mandate is going.”
Bingo.

The White House finally acknowledged the spectacular public disaster of Obamacare’s Internet exchange infrastructure during Monday’s Rose Garden infomercial. But President Shamwow and his sales team are AWOL on the bureaucratic ravages of the federal electronic medical records mandate. Modernized data collection is a worthy goal, of course. But distracted doctors are seeing “more pixels than patients,” Dr. DiNubile observes, and the EMR edict is foisting “dangerous user-unfriendly technology” on physicians and patients.

Instead of concentrating on care, doctors face exhausting regulatory battles over the definition of “meaningful use” of technology, skyrocketing costs and unwarranted Big Brother intrusions on the practice of medicine.

As I reported last year, Obamacare’s top-down, tax-subsidized, job-killing, privacy-undermining electronic record-sharing scheme has been a big fat bust. More than $4 billion in “incentives” has been doled out to force doctors and hospitals to convert and upgrade by 2015. But favored EMR vendors, includingObama bundler Judy Faulkner’s Epic Systems, have undermined rather than enhanced interoperability. Oversight remains lax. And after hyping the alleged benefits for nearly a decade, the RAND Corporation finally ‘fessed up that its cost-savings predictions of $81 billion a year — used repeatedly to support the Obama EMR mandate — were (like every other Obamacare promise) vastly overstated.

In June, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published a study warning that the “rush to capitalize on the huge federal investment of $30 billion for the adoption of electronic medical records led to some unfortunate and unintended consequences” tied to “communication failure, poor data display, wrong order/wrong patient errors and alert fatigue.” Also this summer, Massachusetts reported that 60 percent of doctors could not meet the EMR mandate and face potential loss of their licenses in 2015. And a few weeks ago, the American College of Physicians pleaded with the feds to delay the mandate’s data collection, certification and reporting requirements.

Dr. Hayward K. Zwerling, an internal medicine physician in Massachusetts who is also president of ComChart Medical Software, blasted the Obamacare EMR mandate in a recent open letter: “As the developer of an EMR, I sincerely believe that a well-designed EMR is a useful tool for many practices. However, the federal and state government’s misguided obsession to stipulate which features must be in the EMRs, and how the physician should use the EMRs in the exam room places the politicians in the middle of the exam room between the patient and the physician, and seriously disrupts the physician-patient relationship.” Zwerling’s call to arms appealed to fellow doctors to pressure the feds to repeal the mandate. “It is past time that physicians reclaim control of their offices, if not the practice of medicine.”

As I’ve mentioned previously, my own primary care physician in Colorado Springs quit her regular practice and converted to “concierge care” because of the EMR imposition. Dr. Henry Smith, a Pennsylvania pulmonary doctor, also walked away. “Faced with the implementation costs and skyrocketing overhead in general,” he told me, “I finally threw in the towel and closed my practice.” He said, “As EMRs proliferate, and increased Medicare scrutiny looms, medical documentation is evolving from its original goal of recording what actually was going on with a patient, and what the provider was actually thinking, to sterile boilerplate documents designed to justify the highest billing codes.”

Dr. Michael Laidlaw of Rocklin, Calif., told EHR Practice Consultants that he abandoned the Obamacare EMR “incentive” program “when I realized that I spent the first two to five minutes of each visit endlessly clicking a bunch of garbage to make all the green lights show up on the (meaningful use) meter. I said to myself: ‘I’m not wasting precious seconds of my life and my patients’ time to ensure some database gets filled with data. I didn’t go into medicine for this. It is not benefiting my patients or me. I hate it.’ I actually refused to take the $10K-plus this year. I have even accepted that I would rather be penalized in the future. What is worth the most to me is AUTONOMY.”

Let me underscore that again: Doctors face steep penalties if they can’t meet the radical technology goals imposed by the very same glitch-plagued Obamacare bureaucrats who now need an emergency “tech surge” to fix their own failed info-tech Titanic. The Obamacare wrecking ball has only just begun.

and.......

Here we go: HHS official hints at extending ObamaCare enrollment period as Joe Manchin drafts bill to delay mandate; Update: WH wants six-week extension?

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

The ice is starting to crack. First, Manchin:

Republican Marco Rubio of Florida is working on legislation to delay the mandate indefinitely — which Manchin’s office says the senator does not support — and it’s entirely possible the GOP could push for a delay provision to be included as an amendment vote to the next moving vehicle, using Manchin’s effort as leverage inside the Dome and as political fodder outside it, from entities such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

It’s not yet clear what the bill would look like. Manchin’s office only would confirm that it’s being discussed and the senator is looking for co-sponsors.

The reason it’s not clear what the bill would look like is because Manchin doesn’t care what it looks like. He knows it won’t pass; Democrats can’t risk wreaking havoc on insurers by suddenly exempting the young and healthy from buying insurance when sick people are coming onto the rolls. He’s doing this not because he believes delay is good policy (I think) but because a splashy proposal to put some distance between him and Obama might impress voters back home. For Manchin, at least, it’s time to head for the lifeboats on ObamaCare. And he’s not the only Democrat who’s inching his way towards that side of the ship:

 @DanaBashCNN

new: senior dem source tells me to expect every sen dem running in 2014 to back @JeanneShaheen proposal to delay #ACA enrollment deadline

4:22 PM - 23 Oct 2013

Dem Rep. Rick Nolan told reporters after a White House briefing this morning that what they told him about Healthcare.gov “was not the least bit reassuring.” He and fellow House Dem Sean Maloney are now calling for heads to roll over the website. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson said later this afternoon that he thinks someone should be canned too.

Meanwhile, at HHS:

The administration declined to say whether people who purchase health coverage late in the enrollment period—say, on March 31—would be exempt from a penalty, even if their policy doesn’t kick in until April or May. Nor would the department give a specific date by which people would need to buy coverage to escape a fine. The HHS official, however, indicated that the administration may extend the deadline beyond Feb. 15: “We are exploring options currently and will issue guidance at a later date.”…

There is another sign that the penalty policy may be in flux: While HHS referred MarketWatch’s previous inquiries about the fine, and the deadline to avoid it, to the Treasury, a spokesperson there referred a request Wednesday back to HHS, suggesting that the health officials are now the ones writing new rules for the law.

What’s the difference between extending the enrollment period and delaying the mandate? Well, for one thing, after three years of ferocious Republican attacks (replete with a landmark Supreme Court suit) on the mandate, saying that they’re merely extending the enrollment period would let the White House save a bit of extra face in confirming that the GOP was right to think O-Care wasn’t ready for primetime. Beyond that, though, if you leave the February 15th mandate deadline in effect while extending the period of enrollment from March 31st into, say, July, you run into two big problems. One: If you’ve already paid the penalty in mid-February, why would you then go ahead and buy insurance before July? You’ve already fulfilled your legal obligation to Uncle Sam. Two: The only reason you might buy insurance after you’ve already paid the penalty is because you’ve fallen ill or gotten in an accident and now desperately need insurance — and thanks to ObamaCare’s new rules about preexisting conditions, insurers wouldn’t be able to turn you down. That’s another variation of the death spiral, where only the sick and injured bother to enroll while everyone else stays out of the pool. If you want to extend the enrollment period to encourage the healthy to sign up, you might as well delay the mandate entirely by pushing back the penalty deadline too. But if you do that, you’re also in death-spiral territory because you’re relaxing the incentive on the young and healthy to enroll ASAP. There’s no obvious way out of this maze except fixing the site quickly — or delaying the whole law, of course. Tick tock.

Exit question: Didn’t House Republicans recently offer to end the shutdown in exchange for delaying the individual mandate? Does O want a second shot at that offer?

The White House        ✔ @WhiteHouse

It's. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords,

2:47 PM - 16 May 2013

Update: That was fast:

NBC Nightly News        ✔ @nbcnightlynews

BREAKING: NBC News has learned the WH intends to delay the deadline requiring every American to buy health insurance by as much as 6 weeks

6:31 PM - 23 Oct 2013

I think what that means is that they’re sticking with March 31st as the official deadline — emphasis on “official.” Right now, in order to avoid the mandate penalty, you need to sign up by February 15th or so to make sure that your enrollment’s processed by 3/31. Sounds like the White House wants to tweak the reporting requirements somehow so that you really can sign up as late as the last day of March without suffering any penalty. Either that or they’re going to push the official deadline back six weeks, from March 31 to mid-May. Just one problem in that case, though: It would be illegal.

CNN: Blowing up HealthCare.Gov and starting over still looking like their best option, say more tech experts

POSTED AT 2:41 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.

“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that fixing HealthCare.Gov’s major problems before the end of 2013 just isn’t a feasible task, and that rebuilding the system from scratch would be the administration’s easiest and safest bet:

After assessing the website, Dave Kennedy, the CEO of information-security company Trusted Sec, estimates that about 20% of Healthcare.gov needs to be rewritten. With a whopping 500 million lines of code, according to a recent New York Times report, Kennedy believes fixing the site would probably take six months to a year.

… Nish Bhalla, CEO of information-security firm Security Compass, said it “does not sound realistic at all” that Healthcare.gov will be fully operational before that point.

“We don’t even know where all of the problems lie, so how can we solve them?” Bhalla said. “It’s like a drive-by shooting: You’re going fast and you might hit it, you might miss it. But you can’t fix what you can’t identify.” …

“Projects that are done rapidly usually have a lot of [repetitive] code,” said Arron Kallenberg, a software engineer and tech entrepreneur. “So when you have a problem, instead of debugging something in a single location, you’re tracking it down all through the code base.”

A whopping 500 million lines of code is “so excessive,” says Kennedy, and that a more normal number for a project like the ObamaCare site would lie somewhere in the range of 25 million to 50 million. Dayum.

Admitting that they screwed up and throwing out more than $300 million taxpayer dollars’ worth of work would be one heck of a politically bitter pill to swallow, but this looks like it’s quickly turning into a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t sort of scenario. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Health-industry consultant: “Healthcare.gov is in de facto shutdown”

POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

That’s the highlight of a devastating, click-now-and-read-it-all interview between Ezra Klein and Bob Laszewski, who’s become a mainstay of reporting on Healthcare.gov due to his contacts in the insurance industry. Laszewski’s point is simple: Although the site is still online, HHS is basically frozen in repairing it until they figure out how to get the back-end part running smoothly first. Unless and until the site’s database starts transmitting accurate information about enrollees to the insurance companies, they don’t dare fix the front-end part to make it easier for people to enroll. If they do, enrollees will start flooding in and insurers will end up buried under an avalanche of garbled registration paperwork. Result: Total chaos next year when coverage takes effect and people start filing claims. As things stand right now, the disaster on the front-end is actually preventing the disaster on the back-end from being even more disastrous. That’s the degree of incompetence we’re dealing with here.

And why is there a disaster on the back-end? Nobody knows. For ease of reference below, “834″ is a type of form that’s routinely transmitted to an insurance company whenever someone enrolls in a plan. It’s an industry standard — and yet there are errors scattered throughout the 834s being sent from Healthcare.gov to insurers:

EK: Let’s go back to the 834s for a minute. This sounds like it should be an easy problem to solve. The 834 standard is widely used. It’s not particularly complicated. What’s going wrong?

BL: I don’t know. This process is decades old. Every union and every self-insured employer who contracts with an insurance company uses it. It’s like a 74 Ford pick-up truck. There’s nothing complicated about it. People in the industry are shaking their heads over the errors they’re getting. They’ve been using this process for many years. No one has ever seen these kinds of errors before. No one has any idea where they’re coming from.

EK: The White House says it’s working very closely with insurers to resolve this issue. Are you hearing from insurers working closely with the White House?

BL: No, I can’t confirm or deny that other than to say I talk to a lot of people in the industry, and no one knows of anybody doing that. I’m not saying the White House is lying. If they say they’re doing this, they probably are. It’s possible they have found three or four key people in big insurance companies, and that’s who they’re talking to. But I’ve got a pretty good net, and I don’t know of anybody.

No one knows why HHS couldn’t replicate a standard form of data transmission and no one’s aware of anyone in the industry huddling with the White House to fix this. Solid. The White House’s fallback options don’t work either. The 1-800 number Obama gave out the other day is next to useless, not only by Laszewski’s reckoning (how do you comparison shop among dozens of plans over the phone?) but by that of others who’ve tried it out. Private insurance companies could, in theory, fill the gap if they had a way of telling enrollees what their subsidies will be before they purchase a plan, but the subsidies calculator on Healthcare.gov … doesn’t work either. If HHS can get that up and running, at least, maybe users could be redirected to private sites like eHealthInsurance.com. But then that simply raises the question of why HHS didn’t focus on fixing that part of the site in the home stretch before launch day. Laszewski doesn’t know. As a gloss on all this, go look at the infographic HHS posted today on its website to show the alleged progress they’ve made on a site that’s now in “de facto shutdown.” Infographics should, in theory, be light on text and easy to scan, to allow the info to be absorbed as efficiently as possible. Emphasis on “in theory.”

And yet, and yet, Gallup confirms the trends in other recent polls by finding a slight uptick in support for ObamaCare, from 41/49 in August to 45/50. No surprise as to why if you read my post last night:

Republicans are almost static, indies have inched up a bit but remain firmly underwater in their views of the law — and Democrats have bounced up double-digits in favor. No amount of “glitches” is going to sour them on this project now, especially not after those dastardly tea partiers forced a shutdown to defund the law. They’re in circle-the-wagons mode and ObamaCare’s numbers are benefiting from it — for now. We’ll see what happens next month when this thing still isn’t fixed and Democratic recriminations on the Hill begin in earnest.Exit quotation: “A Washington Post–ABC News poll conducted Oct 17 to 20 and released Oct. 21 found that 56% of those surveyed believed the ‘website glitches’ are ‘part of a broader problem with the health care law.’”

Oh, good: Insurance cancellation notices are snowballing

POSTED AT 5:21 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

This is really news, exactly, because anyone paying attention has known that less choice and higher prices have been on the healthcare docket for awhile now; this is just more of the mounting evidence blowing open one of President Obama’s most well-known and most carelessly delivered guarantees of his signature healthcare overhaul: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

It isn’t merely the umbrella of Big Labor that now has cause to complain about that most shallow of promises; individuals assured of their own accord across the country have beengetting some unpleasant news in the mail over the past couple of months:

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies. …

An estimated 14 million people purchase their own coverage because they don’t get it through their jobs. Calls to insurers in several states showed that many have sent notices.

Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state.  Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent. …

Blue Shield of California sent roughly 119,000 cancellation notices out in mid-September, about 60 percent of its individual business.  About two-thirds of those policyholders will see rate increases in their new policies, said spokesman Steve Shivinsky.

It’s okay, though, ya’ll; the ObamaCare exchanges are here for you! …You know, if you can access them, and once you accept the fact that your new plan is probably going to be somewhere between a little and a lot more expensive. The big excuses here, as ever, are that A) the new plans will include a lot of sweet benefits and more thorough coverage (whether or not people actually want/need it), and that B) some people will be eligible for federal subsidies that will help to offset the higher prices of their new plans (which willfully glosses over both the economic plight of people not eligible for subsidies as well as exactly where it is that all of the fabulous money for these magical subsidies is going to come).

Health policy expert Bob Laszewski (h/t Weekly Standard) thinks that the number of people getting booted off their current plans is going to amount to about 16 million before all is said and done:

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

Did President Obama and his circle of most trusted advisers repeatedly make that absurd promise because they just didn’t care what they had to do to get the thing passed, or because they legitimately didn’t know the extent of the damages that would result from the monster they’ve created? I’m not sure which one disturbs me more.

CBS: Healthcare.gov “dramatically underestimates costs” in new estimate feature

POSTED AT 9:21 AM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

Well, the good news is that HHS has actually tried to fix a few things on the Healthcare.govwebsite.  The bad news is that the fixes make the confusion and incompetence even worse.  After hearing a hailstorm of criticism over the necessity to completely enroll before seeing premium prices, HHS added a premium estimator on the front page of the website.  However, unless you are exactly 27 or 50 years old, the estimates you get will wildly undershoot what you’ll be forced to pay.

CBS reports that industry analysts can’t believe what they are seeing:

 

As President Obama promises to fix HealthCare.gov, his administration is touting what it calls “improvements” in design, specifically a feature that allows you to “See Plans Now.” White House press secretary Jay Carney has said, “Americans across the country can type in their zip code and shop and browse.”

Industry analysts, such as Jonathan Wu, point to how the website lumps people only into two broad categories: “49 or under” and “50 or older.”

Wu said it’s “incredibly misleading for people that are trying to get a sense of what they’re paying.”

Prices for everyone in the 49-or-under group are based on what a 27-year-old would pay. In the 50-or-older group, prices are based on what a 50-year-old would pay.

CBS News ran the numbers for a 48-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., ineligible for subsidies. According to HealthCare.gov, she would pay $231 a month, but the actual plan on BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina’s website costs $360, more than a 50 percent increase. The difference: BlueCross BlueShield requests your birthday before providing more accurate estimates.

The numbers for older Americans are even more striking. A 62-year-old in Charlotte looking for the same basic plan would get a price estimate on the government website of $394. The actual price is $634.

What part of “trust us to fix what we couldn’t deliver correctly in the first place” do industry analysts not understand?

Update: “49 or 50″ should have been “27 or 50.” I’ve fixed it above; thanks to CBRecluse on Twitter for the correction.

Sebelius: Obama didn’t know about website problems until after launch

POSTED AT 10:01 PM ON OCTOBER 22, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

Hey, he reads about every other crisis in the paper. Why not this one, too?

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta that President Obama was completely clueless about serious problems with HealthCare.gov pre-launch. This despite troubles with the minimal testing done on the site and serious concerns from insurance companies, who were even pushing for delay.

President Barack Obama didn’t know of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website — despite insurance companies’ complaints and the site’s crashing during a test run — until days into its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation’s health chief told CNN on Tuesday.

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that there is concern in her department and the White House over the technical debacle surrounding the Obamacare website rollout, saying “no one could be more frustrated than I am and the president.”

The site was supposed to make it simple for people to search and sign-up for new health care policies starting on October 1, but instead it’s been clunky and, at times, inoperable.

“We’re not at all satisfied with the workings of the website,” Sebelius said. “We want it to be smooth and easy and let consumers’ compare plans.”

So, was the president so very uninterested in making sure his legacy law got launched with a modicum of competence that he never checked to make sure this was going well? Is he so surrounded by yes men and women that no one could bring themselves to tell him about this? Was Sebelius just straight-up lying to him day in and day out? Or, is she taking one for the team because he knew there were problems and was too stubborn to delay? I have pretty low expectations for Obama and government in general, but I remain a bit mystified at just how negligent it appears he was. If there’s one thing he is intensely interested in, it’s his own legacy, right?

Sebelius’ star continues to rise in this interview. Check out the tone she strikes. Gupta asks if she should resign, to which she replies, she serves “at the pleasure of the president.”

She uses the bogus giant traffic excuse yet again, even though the Washington Post reported some 2,000 users crashed the site in testing.

She declares there is reason for optimism in the Obamacare launch because, you see, there are so very many people lawfully required to buy insurance being prevented from buying it by this website. It’s not a crisis; it’s an opportunity! It’s a crisitunity.

“What we’re seeing in not only the states that are run by the federal website, but states around the country, is that interest is huge,” she said. “People are eager to have this affordable product, and that product is there.”

She admits she hasn’t tried to sign up using HealthCare.gov because “I have insurance.” Nice. The hundreds of thousands of people losing theirs and with no way to sign up for new, crappier plans appreciate the knife-twisting, Kath.

And, finally, this classic Kinsleyan gaffe: “We anticipated at the outset that everyone would never use the website,” she said.

The entire interview is below, and no, there is nothing in it that suggests they have any idea how to fix this thing.